I have lived in rural Illinois all of my life. My family was not fortunate enough to own a family farm, but I did agricultural labor for cash from the sixth grade on up, through the summer after my first year in law school. I found out three things from this experience: 1. I loved earning money; 2. Farm work was hard and I didn’t want to be doing it for the rest of my life; 3. Showing up on time and working hard was 90% of doing well on a job. I benefited quiet a bit from those simple lessons, in addition to getting a lot of exercise and gaining respect for how hard it is to make a living from farming. Now the federal government has decreed that kids, even in many cases on farms of their own families, should not have these opportunities. The only possible response to this is for me to once again summon the shade of the late Ray Walston: Continue Reading →